In the spirit of his highly acclaimed and influential book Reality
Hunger, David Shields has composed a mordantly funny, relentlessly
self-questioning self-portrait based on questions that interviewers have
asked him over forty years.
David Shields decided to gather every interview he's ever given, going
back nearly forty years. If it was on the radio or TV or a podcast, he
transcribed it. He wasn't sure what he was looking for, but he knew he
wasn't interested in any of his own answers. The questions interested
him--approximately 2,700, which he condensed and collated to form
twenty-two chapters focused on such subjects as Process, Childhood,
Failure, Capitalism, Suicide, and Comedy. Then, according to Shields,
"the real work began: rewriting and editing and remixing the questions
and finding a through-line."
The result is a lacerating self-demolition in which the author--in this
case, a late-middle-aged white man--is strangely, thrillingly absent. As
Chuck Klosterman says, "The Very Last Interview is David Shields doing
what he has done dazzlingly for the past twenty-five years:
interrogating his own intellectual experience by changing the meaning of
what seems both obviously straightforward and obviously wrong."
Shields's new book is a sequel of sorts to his seminal Reality Hunger:
A Manifesto, which Literary Hub recently named one of the most
important books of the last decade. According to Kenneth Goldsmith,
"Just when you think Shields couldn't rethink and reinvent literature
any further, he does it again. The Very Last Interview confirms
Shields as the most dangerously important American writer since
Burroughs."
